THE TWEET THAT WASN’T

 

If you didn’t see the tweet by Greg Kelly “wondering” if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t maybe stage the home invasion and beating of her husband as an election publicity stunt, don’t bother looking for it. A despicable coward for putting it up, he doubled down on cowardice by removing it when a gazillion people called him out, but without apologizing for putting it up in the first place.

Did the far-right cable “news” talking head think maybe nobody saw it? I mean, you know, he’s only got like a half-million zealous far-right followers, so if he sneezes, the gesundheit echoes all over the airwaves.

If you don’t know who Kelly is—if you’re not an assiduous consumer of Faux News or NewsMocks you may not—he’s a so-called “conservative” (alt-right) propagandist posing as a newsman on Greg Kelly Reports (sic). He actually was a newsman at one time, but that was way back in 2003, when he was embedded with the US Army’s Third Infantry Division, Second Brigade during the Iraq invasion.  He received a minor shrapnel wound while on that assignment—too late for a purple heart; he was already out of the Marine Corps by then—but went on to become the first TV reporter to broadcast live pictures of American troops reaching the presidential palace in Baghdad.

Credit where credit’s due.

The son of former New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Greg was, prior to his reporting days (and as I mentioned before), a Marine Corps Reserve officer, retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel. While on active duty as a Harrier Jump Jet pilot from 1991 to 2000, he helped enforce a coalition no-fly zone over Iraq.

The reason I mention this is because I find the tweet—which he threw like a stone at Speaker Pelosi and her seriously injured octogenarian husband before quickly hiding his hand—so much more vile, cowardly and inexcusable than if it had emanated from some ignorant, QAnon-freak, insurrectionist lunatic. This is an educated guy from a New York top-cop’s family and a former senior field grade officer in a premier military institution, in which honor is one of the most sacred of its principles.

What the disappearing tweet in question actually said was: “Just ‘wondering’ if Nancy Pelosi tried to STAGE her own mini January 6^th. Complete with leaving the doors and windows OPEN for the ‘insurrectionists’ and that Depepe (sic) fellow. THAT or she can’t secure her home or office.”

Although Kelly rather grandly calls his show Greg Kelly Reports, if this sort of totally baseless speculation has anything to do with “reporting”, I’ll eat my journalist’s hat. This doesn’t even rise to the level of gossip. It’s merely a piece of ugly provocation to bolster rating among the many conspiracy theorists whom his show courts.

This gratuitous Twitter attack on the aging Speaker of the House, who showed extraordinary courage, cool-headedness and leadership during the January 6, 2020 insurrectionist invasion of the US Capitol (which Kelly denies), couldn’t have been released at a more vulnerable time for both the Speaker and for the US, a scant few days before mid-term elections. The fact that it was posted even as Speaker Pelosi’s eighty-two-year-old husband Paul was undergoing surgery for serious head trauma inflicted with a hammer by just the sort of conspiracy theorist, home-invader nut job that Kelly’s inflammatory TV propaganda appeals to, is nothing short of heinous.

Worse still, Kelly later doubled-down, writing: “Wait a second, 82-year-old Paul Pelosi they SAY was attacked by a guy with a HAMMER, yet he’s expected to make a Full Recovery? And why is NANCY requesting ‘privacy at this time’ – NO.”

The fact that Kelly couldn’t stand sitting in the hot seat and took the first tweet down is scant redemption, especially since he made no apology—the honorable thing to do—for putting it up in the first place. And, furthermore, those of us who saw it before he hid it from view can’t unsee it. Neither decent, honorable people from across the political spectrum who were appalled and sickened by it, nor the radical extremist fringe among his followers who were no doubt inspired to ever-increasing states of fevered paranoia and random violence as the American democratic process unfolds during the midterms.

As an authentic journalist, as a veteran, as a politically independent American, I can’t find words to express my most energetic condemnation of Greg Kelly and every other propagandist currently pouring gasoline on the flames of division. Moreover, I find it tragic that it isn’t an isolated incident, but a mere symptom of the ever more divisive climate in which Americans are living today. Sadly, it is no longer the American Dream that we are living. It is the American nightmare that we grew up thinking never could happen in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”